fedi moonbat
he/they
anarcho whatever
Pinned notes
some reading resources on china
@yogthos @Arindam
As to what sources are reliable a rule of thumb I look at two criteria: 1.The quality of the research they do: Are they drawing from a variety primary texts and reliable statistics? etc. and 2. What are their political biases and interests? do they have principled and coherent analysis? or are they bourgeois propagandists of some kind?
Academic Texts on China
here's some books i'd recommend
Chinese workers: A New History by Jackie Sheehan, history of labour struggles in PRC from 50's to the 90's link to Download Page
Cultural Revolution At the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, history of post cultural revolution changes that led to the rise of Deng and market reforms link to Download Page
The Transformation of Chinese Socialism by Lin Chun, good history up to 2000 or so, they are basically reformists in chinese context link to z-lib - need login
"Rethinking ‘Capitalist Restoration’ in China" by Yiching Wu, essay dealing with this question of china's socialist character, i think Monthly Review are trots full essay
Some leftist blogs about China
Chuang - they're basically the anarchist line of china
Red Dust - the transition to capitalism in China
The capitalist transformation of rural China: Evidence from “Agrarian Change in Contemporary China"
Chinese Worker Bulletin - just a really cool resource we should emulate english link
Gongchao, good resources on the Chinese left broadly english link
Other Marxist / Maoist texts
Communist Party of China Maoist published a document called "China: A Modern Social-Imperialist Power: An Integral Part of the Capitalist-Imperialist System" you can guess what that's about :ablobfoxexplode: other Communist Parties (Maoist) in Asia like in Nepal and the Philippines basically have the same line
*In the Emergence of the New-Imperialist
Countries* tract by these German Maoists that deals in part with china and other countries like India and Brazil that call "new Imperialist states" PDF
"Is China an Imperialist Country? Considerations and Evidence"
By N. B. Turner, marxist leninist PDF
out of room but yeah the fact anarchists, trots and maoists all come to similar conclusions is interesting
#China
Latest notes
@vozercozer i don't know, the thing is that what people want, what the market craves is largely dependant on what the tech bro consensus is, as is clear with AI... i think for example there is a big market for phones with physical keyboards, the reason people stopped buying blackberries is because it had no apps
writing a fedi server with the sole purpose of implementing tumblr style reblogs
coding
programming is so rewarding, wish i learned it when I was much younger, it really is a 'writing is rewriting' thing, the first stage is you write some sloppy code just to make it work with all the little hack you know, and then you gradually do the refactorin, try to adhere to standards and cut down on redundancy, lay awake nights thinking about what the most elegant solution to a minor problem is, dream about coding, spend endless hours studying web ontologies n shit
lenin, gramsci
@0x4d6165 on thing when trying to make sense of Lenin is that he had a major break in the early 1910's when he was exiled, after reading Hegel's logic and other stuff, where he broke with 2nd International Marxism completely, and the idea of the 2 stage revolution, first of the bourgeoisie, then of the proletariate, this is very Kautsky or Plekenov, the 'necessary succession of historical stages' Lenin in exile realizes comes closer or Trotsky and in some ways to Bakunin, in that in undeveloped capitalism you can just go directly to socialism, you don't need to go thru the parliamentary gains
He came close to this in 2 Tactics of Social Democracy, but here he was like 'well the proletarian party much force the bourgeoisie to fullfill it's historic task" but when he gets back to Russia in 1917 all the old Bolsheviks thought he'd lost his mind, he had to fight them on doing the October Revolution, and ruffled feathers bringing Trotsky into the Party. The Old Bolsh wanted to wait for the bourgeois revolution to carry itself out.
Gramsci wrote about this quite a bit and uses this to develop a lot of his theories like how the revolution in Russia succeeded because of the absense of 'civil society' whereas Civil Society helps hold up the state within Europe, these days with the non-profit industrial complex, easy to see how civil society is an active arm of counter revolution www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1917/12/revolution-against-capital.htm
tankies really :pikachu_face: when they encounter actual organic proletarian intellectuals who have read the theory
@0x4d6165 i think that fragmentation is proof of the dogmatic, hyper authoritarian, nature of Leninism, and it's real class interests. It's class character is not the proletariat, but the intelligentsia ( ML's do not even admit the independent existence of such a class, a management or coordinator class, or literati etc. a class distinct from the working and ruling classes that has existed in every society civilization with a particular relation to the means of production ) And then you look at the history of Leninist revolutions and they always take place where there are a lot of temporarily embarrassed bureaucrats who have no hope of a career in the system they suffer under, so they switch their allegiance, which traditionally has been servants of the rulers to that of the proletariat... notice how they conceive the proletarian class dictatorship as basically a mirror reflection of the capitalist or monarchical one, one that must be desperately in need of loyal managers, only this time the proletariat needs managers to rule over itself!
not to say there was not bottom up working class initiative that made these revolutions happen, of course workers and peasants don't wait around for intellectuals to get their shit together, as was shown time and again like in 1917, but that the intelligentsia always set themselves the tasks of assuming the leadership of every such movement, making themselves the representatives of the proletariat, against the proletariat if necessary.
May also be why Leninism has historically failed in the core capitalist countries that are highly bureaucratic, because becoming a manager, an engineer, administrator or expert consultant is one of the only means of real class mobility. Might change tho, because these days with the war against the "Professional Managerial Class" there's a lot of disaffected managers and engineers turning to radical politics.
@0x4d6165 leninism is kindof a fractal thing
Marxist-LeninismTM is Stalinism it was codified in the USSR in the 20's and 30's, but then you could probably differentiate between that Orthodox or Soviet ML and the international MLism that came up later, because for geopolitical reasons every national liberation movement in the mid 20th century had to be ML's so like Fidel/Che, Franz Fanon, Nkrumah, there's the idiosyncretic MLism of the Black Panthers, and then Maoism is a whole fucking thing... Vietnamize Communism gets lumped in with Maoism but kindof developed separate and Parallel to Chinese Communism. Then MaoismTM is a totally different thing from Mao Zedong Thought, and then you could differentiate between all the cults and guerilla movements there
That's not even touching on Trotksy and all the schisms within Trotskyism like CLR James was a kind of post-trotskyist
What's Ironic is a lot of these sects shoot past each other, like Maoist-third-worldism is actually quite similar to Trotskyism, but the maoists hate trotsky because they're stalinists, meanwhile a lot of trots have become like bordigist ultra leftists
I think there are useful bits in the Leninist tradition, the Panthers, Franz Fannon, CLR James, Antonio Gramsci, all very important social, obvs Mao or Che were good at leading guerilla wars, but as soon as you get into the 'isms' and sects it's just a big waste of time
that ain't me but i'll boost you lol
my little webnode has a bit overboard with it, so first up apcu for initial posts that haven't been saved, then the flafile json and md files, and then of course mariadb for curated stuff or shit like tags, and then the sqlite cache for rendered html paages, and then finally the rendered html/rss/atom archives that get eventually dumped after a thread hasn't been updated in a while, there are different use cases for all of these things
you can make a poor nb's redis with a sqlite server running in ram and that's kinda nifty
i'm getting a little better at object oriented stuff like okay ya know this i suseful, but still a lot of the times a plain old function is all you need
anybody got a good git i can get? notabug.org is down and i a poor
the con is other people will get to read my shitty code
the pro is I can get other people to fix my shitty code
my project is like, a php microframework 'core' with webapps built on top of it, and then there's the css microframework and the xsl stylesheets and that all should be separate projects and this shouldn't be too hard with git but i'm so lazy
wouldn't have to rewrite my app all over again every time i fuck it up
i should really learn how to use git
politics
leaves US to escape fascist regime
the US installs fascist regime in that country too
dangit
politics, coup in honduras
living thru a central american coup is much more anti-climactic than one would expect
